Letters to the Editor

March 7, 2015

Parents Need To Know Risks In Sports

To the Sports Editor:

Re “Brain Injury Awareness Improving, Richter Says,” March 1: As they did for Mike Richter, concussions have ended the careers of many high-profile professional athletes. Nowhere is the long-term effect of repeated head injury more evident than in the very publicly acknowledged neurologic sequelae of Muhammad Ali’s boxing career.

But this knowledge is still filtering its way down to the millions of parents who allow their children to play contact sports. The positive aspects of participation in scholastic sports, both physical and psychological, are widely touted; the risks and dangers less discussed. Richter allows his adolescent sons to play hockey because “he sees the rewards outweighing the risks.” This is true only if parents understand the risks and will remove their children from participation immediately after a head injury, and keep them out until cleared to return by a medical professional trained in treating concussion.

If the reward is perceived as providing access to higher education via a scholarship, or to a professional career, the opposite is true; the risks far outweigh the benefits. It has been estimated that of all scholastic athletes who play at the varsity level in high school, only 2 percent receive scholarships to play in college. Only a small fraction of a percent ever play professionally. A much greater number of scholar-athletes suffer injuries of all types, concussions included.

STEVEN J. BARRER, Huntingdon Valley, Pa.

(The writer is a neurosurgeon and director of the Concussion Evaluation Service at Abington Memorial Hospital in Abington, Pa.)

Let Baseball Take Time

To the Sports Editor:

Re “Keeping the Games Moving: Shaving Seconds, Saving Fans,” March 1: The rule mandating a batter keep a foot in the box is demeaning. Keeping managers inside the dugout during challenges places a restriction on their century-old right to roam. The worst new idea is the monitoring of pitchers with a timer.

Baseball’s rules are a classical masterpiece, and it is best to leave the umpire as the game’s administrator of time delays.

SEAN ROMAN STROCKYJ, New Hyde Park, N.Y.

Selective Bible Reading

To the Sports Editor:

Re “College’s View on ‘Sin’ Jolts Gay Athletes,” March 5: Erskine College felt the need to issue a statement that “sexual relations outside of marriage or between persons of the same sex are spoken of in Scripture as sin and contrary to the will of the Creator.” When will they issue statements about such scriptural sins as eating pork (Leviticus 11:8) or shellfish (11:10), wearing linen-wool blends (19:19), shaving off sideburns (19:27) or getting divorced (Mark 10:9-12)?

MARK SCHUBIN, New York

Basketball Threshold

To the Sports Editor:

The death of Earl Lloyd, the N.B.A.’s first black player, evoked a memory. In 1950, I attended a couple of games at Uline Arena when Lloyd was a Washington Capitol. In a game against the Minneapolis Lakers, Lloyd defended against George Mikan, the game’s pre-eminent star, with such tenacity that Mikan visibly lost composure at one point. Applying Sherlock Holmes’s famous dictum that large inferences can be drawn from small details, one might then have foreseen what was soon to happen with the advent of Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, et al.: that the game was at the threshold of radical change with the elimination of racial barriers.